Friday, November 08, 2024

Research update: Chalk-coated textiles cool in urban environments




American Chemical Society

Research update: Chalk-coated textiles cool in urban environments 

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On this outdoor testing station, the cooling ability of fabric squares treated with a chalk-based coating was tested in multiple urban environments, such as this open concrete veranda next to a building.

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Credit: Adapted from Applied Materials & Interfaces 2024, DOI: 10.1021/acsami.4c15984





As air temperatures stay elevated through fall months, people may still want clothes that cool them down while outside, especially if they live in cities that stay warmer than rural landscapes. Researchers who previously demonstrated a cooling fabric coating now report on additional tests of a treated polyester fabric in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces. Fabric treated with the team’s chalk-based coating kept the air underneath up to 6 degrees Fahrenheit cooler in warmer urban environments.

Researchers Evan D. Patamia, Megan K. Yee and Trisha L. Andrew created a polymer-mineral coating for commercial fabrics and presented preliminary assessments of the coating’s cooling effect at ACS Fall 2024, a meeting of the American Chemical Society.

Now, the researchers confirm that their treated polyester poplin fabric could keep a person up to 15 F cooler than untreated polyester. Additionally, they have expanded the testing environments to four outdoor urban settings, including areas with materials that absorb and emit the sun’s heat. Observations made during hot, cloudless days indicate that treated polyester cooled the air underneath the fabric regardless of the environment:

  • Open grass field: averaging 6 F below ambient air temperature.
  • Concrete-paved alley between buildings: averaging 3 F below ambient.
  • Asphalt-paved parking lot: averaging 1 F below ambient.
  • Open concrete veranda: averaging 3 F below ambient.

The researchers say their expanded results show the potential of their coated fabrics to provide energy-free cooling for pedestrians and cyclists in urban environments.

The authors acknowledge support from an Interdisciplinary Research Grant from the College of Natural Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

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The American Chemical Society (ACS) is a nonprofit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. ACS’ mission is to advance the broader chemistry enterprise and its practitioners for the benefit of Earth and all its people. The Society is a global leader in promoting excellence in science education and providing access to chemistry-related information and research through its multiple research solutions, peer-reviewed journals, scientific conferences, e-books and weekly news periodical Chemical & Engineering News. ACS journals are among the most cited, most trusted and most read within the scientific literature; however, ACS itself does not conduct chemical research. As a leader in scientific information solutions, its CAS division partners with global innovators to accelerate breakthroughs by curating, connecting and analyzing the world’s scientific knowledge. ACS’ main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.

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Planting trees in the Arctic could make global warming worse, not better, say scientists


An international group of scientists argue that tree planting at high latitudes will accelerate, rather than decelerate, global warming.



Aarhus University

Graphics 

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The direct and indirect effects of afforestation on climate forcing at high latitudes and their relative magnitudes over the lifetime of a plantation.

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Credit: Laura Barbero-Palacios, Greenland Institute of Natural Resources



Tree planting has been widely touted as a cost-effective way of reducing global warming, due to trees’ ability to store large quantities of carbon from the atmosphere. But, writing in the journal Nature Geoscience, an international group of scientists argue that tree planting at high latitudes will accelerate, rather than decelerate, global warming.

As the climate continues to warm, trees can be planted further and further north, and large-scale tree-planting projects in the Arctic have been championed by governments and corporations as a way to mitigate the worst effects of climate change.

However, when trees are planted in the wrong places - such as normally treeless tundra and mires, as well as large areas of the boreal forest with relatively open tree canopies - they can make global warming worse.

According to lead author Assistant Professor Jeppe Kristensen from Aarhus University in Denmark, the unique characteristics of Arctic and sub-Arctic ecosystems make them poorly suited for tree planting for climate mitigation.

“Soils in the Arctic store more carbon than all vegetation on Earth,” said Kristensen. “These soils are vulnerable to disturbances, such as cultivation for forestry or agriculture, but also the penetration of tree roots. The semi-continuous daylight during the spring and early summer, when snow is still on the ground, also makes the energy balance in this region extremely sensitive to surface darkening, since green and brown trees will soak up more heat from the sun than white snow.” 

In addition, the regions surrounding the North Pole in North America, Asia and Scandinavia are prone to natural disturbances - such as wildfires and droughts - that kill off vegetation. Climate change makes these disturbances both more frequent and more severe.

“This is a risky place to be a tree, particularly as part of a homogeneous plantation that is more vulnerable to such disturbances,” said Kristensen. “The carbon stored in these trees risks fueling disturbances and getting released back to the atmosphere within a few decades.”

The researchers say that tree planting at high latitudes is a prime example of a climate solution with a desired effect in one context but the opposite effect in another.

“The climate debate is very carbon-focused, because the main way humans have modified the Earth’s climate in the last century is through emitting greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels,” said Kristensen. “But at the core, climate change is the result of how much solar energy entering the atmosphere stays, and how much leaves again – Earth’s so-called energy balance.”

Greenhouse gases are one important determinant of how much heat can escape our planet’s atmosphere. However, the researchers say that at high latitudes, how much sunlight is reflected back into space, without being converted into heat (known as the albedo effect), is more important than carbon storage for the total energy balance.

The researchers are calling for a more holistic view of ecosystems to identify truly meaningful nature-based solutions that do not compromise the overall goal: slowing down climate change.

“A holistic approach is not just a richer way of looking at the climate effects of nature-based solutions, but it’s imperative if we’re going to make a difference in the real world,” said senior author Professor Marc Macias-Fauria, from the University of Cambridge’s Scott Polar Research Institute.

However, the researchers recognise that there can be other reasons for planting trees, such as timber self-sufficiency, but these cases do not come with bonuses for climate mitigation.

“Forestry in the far North should be viewed like any other production system and compensate for its negative impact on the climate and biodiversity,” said Macias-Fauria. “You can’t have your cake and eat it, and you can’t deceive the Earth. By selling northern afforestation as a climate solution, we’re only fooling ourselves.”

So how can we moderate global warming at high latitudes? The researchers suggest that working with local communities to support sustainable populations of large herbivores, such as caribou, could be a more viable nature-based solution to climate change in Arctic and subarctic regions than planting millions of trees. 

“There is ample evidence that large herbivores affect plant communities and snow conditions in ways that result in net cooling,” said Macias-Fauria. “This happens both directly, by keeping tundra landscapes open, and indirectly, through the effects of herbivore winter foraging, where they modify the snow and decrease its insulation capacity, reducing soil temperatures and permafrost thaw.”

The researchers say it’s vital to consider biodiversity and the livelihoods of local communities in the pursuit of nature-based climate solutions.

“Large herbivores can reduce climate-driven biodiversity loss in Arctic ecosystems and remain a fundamental food resource for local communities,” said Macias-Fauria. “Biodiversity and local communities are not an added benefit to nature-based solutions: they are fundamental. Any nature-based solutions must be led by the communities who live at the frontline of climate change.”

 

New insights into the Denisovans – the new hominin group that interbred with modern day humans



Trinity College Dublin




Scientists believe individuals of the most recently discovered “hominin” group (the Denisovans) that interbred with modern day humans passed on some of their genes via multiple, distinct interbreeding events that helped shape early human history.

In 2010, the first draft of the Neanderthal genome was published, and comparisons with modern human genomes revealed that Neanderthal and modern humans had interbred in the past. A few months later, analysis of a genome sequenced from a finger bone excavated in the Denisova cave in the Altai mountains in Siberia revealed that this bone fragment was from a newly discovered hominin group that we now call Denisovans, who also interbred with modern humans. 

“This was one of the most exciting discoveries in human evolution in the last decade,” said Dr Linda Ongaro, Postdoctoral Research in Trinity College Dublin’s School of Genetics and Microbiology, and first author of a fascinating new review article published in leading international journal Nature Genetics

“It’s a common misconception that humans evolved suddenly and neatly from one common ancestor, but the more we learn the more we realise interbreeding with different hominins occurred and helped to shape the people we are today.

“Unlike Neanderthal remains, the Denisovan fossil record consists of only that finger bone, a jawbone, teeth, and skull fragments. But by leveraging the surviving Denisovan segments in Modern Human genomes scientists have uncovered evidence of at least three past events whereby genes from distinct Denisovan populations made their way into the genetic signatures of modern humans.” 

Each of these presents different levels of relatedness to the sequenced Altai Denisovan, indicating a complex relationship between these sister lineages. 

In the review article, Dr Ongaro and Prof. Emilia Huerta-Sanchez outline evidence suggesting that several Denisovan populations, who likely had an extensive geographical range from Siberia to Southeast Asia and from Oceania to South America, were adapted to distinct environments. 

They further outline a number of genes of Denisovan origin that gave modern day humans advantages in their different environments.

Dr Ongaro added: “Among these is a genetic locus that confers a tolerance to hypoxia, or low oxygen conditions, which makes a lot of sense as it is seen in Tibetan populations; multiple genes that confer heightened immunity; and one that impacts lipid metabolism, providing heat when stimulated by cold, which confers an advantage to Inuit populations in the Arctic.

“There are numerous future directions for research that will help us tell a more complete story of how the Denisovans impacted modern day humans, including more detailed genetic analyses in understudied populations, which could reveal currently hidden traces of Denisovan ancestry. Additionally, integrating more genetic data with archaeological information – if we can find more Denisovan fossils – would certainly fill in a few more gaps.”

DNA evidence rewrites histories for people buried in volcanic eruption in ancient Pompeii



Cell Press
Pompeii body casts 

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Pompeii body casts

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Credit: Archeological Park of Pompeii




In 79 CE, the active volcanic system in southern Italy known as Somma-Vesuvius erupted, burying the small Roman town of Pompeii and everyone in it. The “Pompeii eruption” covered everything in a layer of ash that preserved many of the bodies. Now, ancient DNA collected from the famed body casts alters the history that’s been written since the once forgotten town’s rediscovery in the 1700s. As reported on November 7, 2024, in Current Biology, the DNA evidence shows that individuals’ sexes and family relationships don’t match traditional interpretations that had been formulated largely from modern-day assumptions.

“The scientific data we provide do not always align with common assumptions,” says David Reich of Harvard University. “For instance, one notable example is the discovery that an adult wearing a golden bracelet and holding a child, traditionally interpreted as a mother and child, were an unrelated adult male and child. Similarly, a pair of individuals thought to be sisters, or mother and daughter, were found to include at least one genetic male. These findings challenge traditional gender and familial assumptions.”

The study team including Alissa Mittnik, also at Harvard University, and David Caramelli of the Universita di Firenze in Italy had heard the stories of Pompeii. They realized that ancient DNA and strontium isotopes used to date samples could help them understand better the diversity and origins of Pompeii’s residents. They extracted DNA from highly fragmented skeletal remains mixed with the plaster casts, focusing on 14 of 86 casts that are undergoing restoration.

The researchers’ goal was to learn as much as possible from the DNA evidence about these 14 victims. Their approach allowed them to accurately determine the genetic relationships, sex, and ancestry of those 14 individuals. What they found out was largely in contrast to long-held assumptions based solely on the physical appearance and positioning of the casts.

The genetic data offered insight into the Pompeiians’ ancestry, revealing that the Pompeiians had diverse genomic backgrounds. They primarily descended from recent immigrants from the eastern Mediterranean. The finding highlights the cosmopolitan nature of the Roman Empire, according to the researchers.

 “Our findings have significant implications for the interpretation of archaeological data and the understanding of ancient societies,” Mittnik says. “They highlight the importance of integrating genetic data with archaeological and historical information to avoid misinterpretations based on modern assumptions. This study also underscores the diverse and cosmopolitan nature of Pompeii’s population, reflecting broader patterns of mobility and cultural exchange in the Roman Empire.”

 The findings highlight the need for a multidisciplinary approach including genetic analysis to fully understand the past of Pompeii and beyond, the researchers say.

“This study illustrates how unreliable narratives based on limited evidence can be, often reflecting the worldview of the researchers at the time,” Caramelli says.  

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Current Biology, Pilli et al. “Ancient DNA challenges prevailing interpretations of the Pompeii plaster casts” https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(24)01361-7

Current Biology (@CurrentBiology), published by Cell Press, is a bimonthly journal that features papers across all areas of biology. Current Biology strives to foster communication across fields of biology, both by publishing important findings of general interest and through highly accessible front matter for non-specialists. Visit http://www.cell.com/current-biology. To receive Cell Press media alerts, contact press@cell.com.

 

Politics at all levels, by all means

From Freedom News by Jonathan Eibisch

A fascist in the White House, and the ‘traffic lights’ go out in Germany

The promised turning point is clearly coming much louder than many would have expected. Why do anarchists care who is in government, one might ask. In fact, the ruling order remains the same precisely because of the replacement of its political decision-makers. One thing is clear: the neoliberal-technocratic model of government is being replaced by the protectionist-nationalist model in this phase. And ironically, both are still sides of the same coin.

Democrats need not be surprised why fascists are taking over the bastions of political power one after the other: social security has been systematically dismantled since the turn of the millennium, public infrastructure has been left to rot, corrupt super-rich people have not been kept in check, and political rights have been restricted. It is correct to say that the protectionist-nationalist model of government is not fascist in itself. However, as a counter-revolutionary avant-garde, fascism plays the role of an integrating element in the reactionary and aggressive project of securing power.

Meanwhile in the Federal Republic of Germany, since it was switched on, the ‘traffic lights government’ has been attacked by conservatives. What initially made some people want change increasingly seemed like an imposition for other parts of the population. Despite different population compositions and narratives, the core issues of the formation of camps in North America and Europe are the same: the lines of conflict run along economic models, the handling of migration and cultural issues. Even if state and federal politics are two different things, this applies to both levels. This is creating new constellations, while the camp of supporters of a socially equal, liberal democracy is becoming increasingly smaller and moving closer together.

The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance would have liked to become a stepping stone for the future state government – but wanted to take on this role only on its own terms. As far as the federal government was concerned, the issue was ostensibly the insoluble controversy over economic policy, in which Christian Lindner stuck to the neoliberal dogma of not taking on any more national debt – as if the state were not sovereign over money itself. There were probably many other issues in the background. Above all, however, the FDP wanted to save its ass in order to distance itself from the red-green coalition before the regular election date next autumn. This strategy may also lead it to insignificance, but nothing ventured, nothing gained.

A lot of it was used in the USA too: enormous sums of money, overreaching campaigners’ involvement, celebrity appearances and propaganda battles on social media – which experience shows are not unaffected by some foreign interests. None of this helped Kamala Harris. Although it seemed like a smart move to bring her into the field when Uncle Biden mentally abdicated, the Democratic Party failed to appeal to those large sections of the population that were now miles away from them: white men with a low level of education. Nevertheless, Trump was elected in a wide variety of countries, by a wide variety of groups. The reasons for this are complex, or at least multiple. But you can only understand Trump’s voters and his electoral success if you understand a collective rationality in voting decisions when they occur en masse. This consists in the fact that the fronts should be clarified, prosperity defended and things finally get back to “normal”.

In all cases, a considerable number of citizens are clearly  demanding that politics be made again. They are looking for points of friction, want to identify the enemy, strive for power and ultimately question the system. Where there is sawing, there are chips.

The political landscape continues to change rapidly – but what are the anarchists doing? First of all, they would do well not to allow themselves to be carried away by the political spectacle. It is precisely the superficiality of the bourgeois democrats that leads to their chronic misunderstanding of neo-fascism, as well as to the ignorance and suppression of social movements. But then it would be important to establish themselves as a conscious, active factor with a shared vision.

Broken down, this means that you need a toolbox for flexible, low-hierarchy, autonomous and federated groups, a common value base and culture, and a shared set of basic theoretical assumptions. This does not mean forcing all anarchists into a unified organisation with a clear program and leadership structures. In my opinion, it means organising in the first place.

Instead, in the broad left-wing scene you encounter an unconscious, comfortable bunch of scattered and insecure individuals who talk at the same time, do not think in the long term or in terms of goals that can be achieved. It is a pitiful game that I will address elsewhere. The political upheavals in particular should motivate reorganisation. Anyone who is still running around like a bunch of cackling chickens has not heard the shot.

 

The radical optimism of David Graeber

‘It does not have to be this way’: the radical optimism of David Graeber

From The Guardian by Rebecca Solnit, Nov. 7

‘It does not have to be this way’: the radical optimism of David Graeber

As a new collection of his writing is published, Rebecca Solnit remembers her friend, the late activist and anarchist who believed ordinary people had the power to change the world

David Graeber was a joyful, celebratory person. An enthusiast, voluble, on fire with the possibilities in the ideas and ideologies he wrestled with. Every time we met – from New Haven in the early 00s to London a few years before his death in 2020 – he was essentially the same: beaming, rumpled, with a restless energy that seemed to echo the constant motion of his mind, words tumbling out as though they were, in their unstoppable abundance, overflowing. But he was also much respected in activist circles for being a good listener, and his radical egalitarianism was borne out in how he related to the people around him.

He was always an anthropologist. After doing fieldwork among traditional peoples in Madagascar, he just never stopped, but he turned his focus to his own society. Essays such as Dead Zones of the Imagination: On Violence, Bureaucracy, and ‘Interpretive Labor’ and his book Bullshit Jobs came from using the equipment of an anthropologist on stuff usually regarded as boring, or not regarded at all – the function and impact of bureaucracy. His 2011 bestseller on debt reminded us that money and finance are among the social arrangements that could be rearranged for the better.

He insisted, again and again, that industrialised Euro-American civilisation was, like other societies past and present, only one way of doing things among countless options. He cited times when societies rejected agriculture or technology or social hierarchy, when social groups chose what has often been dismissed as primitive because it was more free. And he rejected all the linear narratives that present contemporary human beings as declining from primordial innocence or ascending from primitive barbarism. He offered, in place of a single narrative, many versions and variations; a vision of societies as ongoing experiments, and human beings as endlessly creative. That variety was a source of hope for him, a basis for his recurrent insistence that it doesn’t have to be this way.

As Marcus Rediker wrote in his review of David’s posthumous book Pirate Enlightenment, “Everything Graeber wrote was simultaneously a genealogy of the present and an account of what a just society might look like.” He was concerned about inequality of all kinds, including gender inequality in this society and others, and the violence that enforces inequality and unfreedom, as well as how they might be delegitimised and where and when societies might have escaped them. He focused, in short, on freedom and its impediments.

He despised the tedium of academic bureaucracy but he loved activist meetings, and revelled in scheming and mischief

He was often credited with coining the Occupy Wall Street slogan “We are the 99%”, but he insisted on paring his credit down to having contributed the 99% part to a phrase so compelling that “the 1%” remains a widely used description of the uppermost elite. “The 99%” is a hopeful phrase, in opposition to the old layer-cake description of the working, middle, and upper classes. It’s an assertion that the great majority of us are working, and often financially struggling or precarious; that most of us have a lot in common – and a lot of reasons to oppose the super-rich.

David took joy in his work, and in how that work intersected with actualities on the ground – especially with the radical movements of the late 1990s and the new millennium, including the anti-corporate-globalisation movement that peaked with the shutdown of the World Trade Organization ministerial conference in Seattle in 1999, the Zapatista uprising in Mexico that began in 1994, and the many forms of radical egalitarianism manifesting as direct-democracy experiments and resistance to unjust institutions and governments, especially 2011’s Occupy Wall Street, in which he was deeply involved.

That joy: maybe this is how everyone should feel about ideas and the ways that they open up or close off possibilities. The way that, as he wrote, “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently.” If you truly believe that, if you perceive a world that is constructed according to certain assumptions and values, then you see that it can be changed, not least by changing those assumptions and values.

We have to recognise that ideas are tools that we wield – and with them, some power. David wanted to put these tools in everyone’s hands, or remind them that they are already there. Which is part of why he worked hard at – and succeeded in – writing in a style that wasn’t always simple but was always as clear and accessible as possible, given the material. Egalitarianism is a prose style, too. Our mutual friend the writer, film-maker, and debt abolitionist Astra Taylor texted him: “Re-reading Debt. You are such a damn good writer. A rare skill among lefties.” He texted back that August, a month before his demise: “Why thanks! Well at least I take care to do so – I call it ‘being nice to the reader,’ which is an extension of the politics, in a sense.”

In order to believe that people can govern themselves in the absence of coercive institutions and hierarchies, anarchists must have great faith in ordinary people, and David did. A sentence Lyndsey Stonebridge wrote about Hannah Arendt could apply equally well to him: “To fixate on her exceptional mind is to miss something that is important about her lessons in thinking: thinking is ordinary, she teaches; that is its secret power.”

He had a strained academic career, despite his brilliance and originality – or because of them. In the first book of his that I read, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, a tiny book bursting with big ideas, he wrote, “In the United States there are thousands of academic Marxists of one sort or another, but hardly a dozen scholars willing openly to call themselves anarchists … It does seem that Marxism has an affinity with the academy that anarchism never will. It was, after all, the only great social movement that was invented by a PhD, even if afterwards, it became a movement intending to rally the working class.” And then he argues that anarchism was not, by comparison, an idea created by a few intellectuals; instead, “the basic principles of anarchism – self-organisation, voluntary association, mutual aid” – have been around “as long as humanity.”

Hope is a tricky business among intellectuals and activists

David’s recurrent rallying cry as both a scholar and an activist was: “It does not have to be this way.” Where academia can be cool and guarded, pulling away from direct engagement, he was warm and enthusiastic, wanting to see ideas lead to actions that could change the world. Taylor notes: “While he despised the tedium of academic bureaucracy, he loved activist meetings, savouring the ideological debates and revelling in various forms of planning, scheming, and mischief.” He was hopeful, not foolishly so, but due to the evidence he had amassed that human societies have taken myriad forms, that the people who are supposedly powerless can together wield quite a lot of power, and that ideas matter. One of my favourite scraps of information in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology is about Madagascar’s Sakalava people, who officially revere dead kings – but these kings make their wishes known “through spirit mediums who are usually elderly women of commoner descent.” That is, a system officially led by elite men is controlled by non-elite women.

Hope is a tricky business among intellectuals and activists. Cynicism, though it’s often inaccurate about both human nature and political possibilities, gives the appearance of sophistication; despair is often seen as sophisticated and worldly-wise while hopefulness is seen as naive, when the opposite is not infrequently true. Hope is risky; you can lose, and you often do, but the records show that if you try, sometimes you win.

His essay Despair Fatigue opens: “Is it possible to become bored with hopelessness?” David’s superpower was being an outsider. He did not proceed from widely shared assumptions but sought to dismantle them, urging us to see they’re arbitrary, confining and optional, and inviting everyone into the spaces this opens up (while saluting those already there). So much of his writing says, in essence, “What happens if we don’t accept this?” – if we dissect it to see its origins and impacts, or if we reject it, if we lift it off like some burden we don’t have to carry, some outfit we don’t have to wear? What happens is we get free.

This is an edited extract of Rebecca Solnit’s foreword to The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World by David Graeber (Allen Lane £25). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

ARB #8 Summer/Fall 2024

ARB #8 Summer/Fall 2024

The Anarchist Review of Books publishes intelligent, non-academic writing with an anti-authoritarian perspective. We are dedicated to transforming society through literature and through open, incisive critique of the media, politics, history, art and writing that shape our world.

Cover image: Whose Streets by Tabitha Arnold. Punch needle embroidered wool yarn on linen, 2020

Welcome to the eighth issue of the Anarchist Review of Books, produced by a collective based in Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Exarchia, New York, Oakland, Richmond, and Seattle.

As ARB editor Nick Mamatas likes to say, “if you don’t use your imagination someone else will do it for you.” Nowhere is this more salient than in the United States, where two political parties educated in the same institutions, invested in the same stocks, beholden to the same corrupt corporations and judicial system, and employing the same military, police, and secret service have created a mass delusion of extreme difference between themselves; a hysteria that has Americans imagining Nazis where conservative uncles stand and terrorists in the guise of college freshman. The clear, undeniable fact is that a single ideology has its teeth sunk deep in the throat of America. Capitalism governs, and class is the only forbidden subject in a nation viciously pitted against itself over the choice to elect a smiling cop or a snarling billionaire.

This hallucination of difference isn’t limited to true believers and political parties. It extends into radical spaces where people who fundamentally agree, and who have been attacked by the same forces, have forsaken the solidarity required to confront the crises at hand; have in fact come to believe that they must police one another and explain the world to one another; effectively boring, enraging, and alienating one another into a state of despair. A general strike would be much more fun.

How this happened is not a mystery, and one can find ample analysis of it, including in the pages of this magazine, but the mechanisms by which it is produced and sustained are something to which anti-authoritarians should give their full attention. The illusion of “choice” and “meaning” created through information overload, endlessly refreshable news cycles, and the proliferation of AI-generated bullshit is the Situationists’ nightmare come true. Beneath the monopolization of attention and the capture of imagination, new possibilities, collective action, and individual thought become increasingly difficult. How do we dream of something new from within this framework? How do we bring that dream to life and protect it?

As Shellyne Rodriguez has said in these pages, the NGO take-over of groups like Black Lives Matter in the U.S., and of migration rights in the Mediterranean is a warning to us all. This kind of counter-revolutionary management of movements is coming fast for smaller mutual aid projects too, turning longstanding successful practices such as squatting, peoples’ assemblies, volunteer food distribution, and health initiatives into privatized or state funded endeavors, or into elite buys-ins akin to the Park Slope Food Coop. Entering into the numbing and isolating logic of empire, and arguing from within that logic is to not only lose possibilities for change, for solidarity, for self-direction, but to also lose joy and peace of mind.

The empiric and market imaginary; the myth of meritocracy; of humanitarian professionals and altruistic technocrats; of self-made men and hard-working patriots from the heartland—these are themes, characters, and settings that engage the human desire for story, but have little to do with the observable world.

There are few resources to battle an enemy that employs our innate desire for fantasy and meaning-making in order to pacify, stupefy, and control. Giving over one’s imagination is a guarantee of defeat. It is to give up the last ground on which we might truly stand.

As every good soldier or mystic knows, it’s hearts and minds that count; bodies are always expendable.

In these pages we bring you no solutions but rather cracks in the armor, holes in the fortress walls, spaces to think of something new. What we do with these spaces is up to us. In this issue we have dispatches from people’s movements in the West Bank, Argentina, and the U.S., Philip Shelley reminds us what it is to transgress, Aleksandra Kaminska interviews Eileen Myles, Dread Scott and David Baillie expound on the anti-fascist (and fascist) roots of Punk, Elly Bangs brings us a picture of the future, and Maria Xilouri shows us how to dream and drift; plus reviews by Heather Bowlan, Jules Bentley, and Agnes Borinsky, and art by Tabitha Arnold, Jess Vieira, Jesse L. Freeman, John Ahearn, Scott Treleaven, Joy Drury Cox, and Sylvia Plachy.

ALL POWER TO THE IMAGINATION

Cara Hoffman
August 2024